Mugged By History In London

I was minding my own business, trying to enjoy some culture during my trip to London, when something punched me in the face – violently attacking my intellect and jolting my sense of honesty.

"British Museum from NE 2" by Ham - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons
“British Museum from NE 2” by Ham – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

The attacker came at me in the supposedly refined British Museum in London, the UK’s national museum housing precious archaeological treasures. I was hoping to read something about my national history in the Near Eastern wing, as a Jew hailing from ancient Israel, when a sign entitled “The Levant” almost knocked me out of existence.

“The ancient Levant compromises modern Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Western Syria. The region was home to two great indigenous peoples – the Canaanites and the Amorites.”

Orit London British Museum levant

I guess the Hebrew Bible and archaeology documenting ancient Israel are not legitimate sources for the curators at the British Museum. To them, the people of Israel – the truly indigenous tribes and national people in the Levant for hundreds of years – to be exiled and returned – either didn’t exist, or the scholars did not find them worthy of the appellation of “great.” Perhaps the curators chose not to accurately portray ancient history so that it could justify re-writing modern history with the creation of “modern Palestine” – which is where on the map exactly? (And as a colleague pointed out, why does only “Palestine” deserve the appellation of “modern”?)

If my intellect weren’t black and blue enough, here comes another punch in the form of the inventors of the “alphabet” – the Canaanites, who the curators are probably setting up as the progenitors of modern “Palestine” – a name, in fact, given by the Romans to the geographic area after they violently kicked the Jews off the land of Israel.

Orit London British Museum alphabet

While the alphabet is largely seen, according to a cursory Google search, as invented by a Semitic people (which one exactly is the subject of debate), I seem to recall that the first full-fledged texts written in alphabet form and surviving from the Iron Age make up today’s Hebrew Bible. Even the example the British Museum offers, “Ras”, is the root of “rosh” – “head” in Hebrew. But no, Hebrew – like ancient Israel – is not even worth a mention.

In fact, the Israelites played a central role in utilizing an alphabetic system to encourage the masses toward education, as Joshua Berman, in Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford University Press) posits: “…the alphabetic script in which the Bible was written lent itself to the task of disseminating God’s word more readily than would have been possible with texts produced in a culture founded on cuneiform…Because of the relative simplicity of the alphabet, the gap between the fully literate and those with a vulgar level of literacy would, perforce, have been narrowed, thus facilitating the transmission of the biblical texts broadly across the populace in the oral-written matrix described later.”

But, to its credit, the British Museum sought to give me a salve, in a dark corner, a band-aid sign to make me feel that my people (who were apparently “Canaanite pastoralists” – whatever that is) existed – some place, some where, as some poor, pathetic, scattered people. The description is so scant, lazy and poorly-written that I can hardly make sense of it. Apparently, the Israelites did not have their own united kingdom under David and Solomon in their own land. I’m not exactly sure whom the curators are talking about when they write:

“The first record referring to Judah occurs, in fact only in the reign of Tiglath Pileser III (745-727 BC), when a king of Jerusalem, Ahaz, appealed to the Assyrians for help against his neighbors.”

Orit London British Museum israeljudah

Which brings up the questions: Why is the British Museum rewriting history, deleting Jewish national presence from the Land of Israel? What sources do they consult for their information? And why would they so blatantly twist history and fact?

Are board members pro-Palestinian activists? Was this the request of the Sackler family, the (Jewish?) benefactors of the Ancient Near East wing? Or has academia been so infested by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish revisionists that the scholars made innocent mistakes based on the textbooks out there?

Whatever the reason, this exhibition was a huge disappointment and a stain on my trip to London, an insanely expensive city that I can’t help but feel is losing its direction and status as a happening, bright, smart metropolis that could inspire and educate so many people towards truth and honest creativity, as it may have done, once upon a time.

10 thoughts on “Mugged By History In London”

  1. There are less than 300K Jews in the entire UK and rampant anti-Semitism. I would guess that the museum is just pandering to the prevailing attitudes.

    1. There is no ‘rampant’ anti Semitiism in the UK. There IS more than in the past, certainly since last years’s war in Gaza, but no more or elss than elsewhere in Europe.

  2. The exhibit is historically incoherent. The only “modern Palestine” is in fact what activists call “historical Palestine” which, itself, is a reference to Mandatory Palestine as it existed from 1923-48. It is unlikely most people would think of the current Palestinian Territories, though presumably that is what the curators probably had in mind. Why it is named first is also something of a mystery but might be explained by a well-worn history of laziness among historians who in many instances make anachronistic references to “Palestine.”
    As to Israelites being Canaanite pastoralists, the very next paragraph which refers to their re-integration with Canaanites exposes the incoherence of the claim. On the other hand, if the British Museum sticks to its claim that Israelites=Canaanites, then they confirm, in an odd and roundabout way, that the modern day Jewish People are the surviving indigenous population.
    It’s simply not a serious scholarly exhibit.

    1. Well now, I may be misunderstanding you, but it seems to me you’ve made a couple of mistakes.
      Many people, perhaps especially Brits, who have been fed on a steady diet of “innocent Palestinians whose ancient homeland of curiously disjointed Gaza-WestBank is under siege by big, bad, Israel” will know exactly what they meant. People with a better balanced diet of facts sure seem to be in the minority.
      Meanwhile, your notion regarding ‘anachronistic references’ to Palestine seems incorrect. “Palestine” is an entity that has had literally nearly two thousand years of historical mention. It was, of course, the Roman name for the Jewish homeland, renamed after the Philistines. So for a museum to mention a historic Palestine without any context is a legitimate thing to do, and is not lazy at all. It’s only when one mentions the “historic Palestine, homeland of the ancient indigenous Arabian Palestinian people who just happen to be just like the rest of the Arabian empire” that one moves into quack territory.
      As for mentioning “modern Palestine” before Israel, I’ll take that as an indication of the museum staff’s relative fondness for the two.

  3. The effort to rewrite history concerning the Jews and the Jewish claims to Israel are extraordinary. It is fascinating to see this coming from Great Britain.

  4. I myself visited that museum not very long ago, and I too was annoyed at their dismissal of Jewish history. Although, I think it was some other part of the exhibit that annoyed me – I don’t remember now. I remember commenting, “leave it to the British to dismiss Israel”.
    That said, I think it’s worth giving them “credit” on one thing. If you don’t already know, it has long been in vogue by a large swath of the archaeologists to deny David and Solomon as having been actual people. I believe the argument was mostly rooted in the idea that, if they’d existed, we’d have found evidence of a strong central government which we had not found. There’s more too it, but it’s not a special quirk of the British Museum to have that attitude.
    So too, an inclination to reject wholesale the Bible as a legitimate historical document. If you don’t know, the field of archaeology was basically founded by rich European Christians in the 18th century who’d been told to hang out in warmer climates due to health reasons. They passed the time excavating things (in some rare cases, with dynamite) and playing historian. These guys knew their Bible, and had a funny habit of confidently proclaiming ruin X as biblical site Y without any corroborating evidence. It was intellectually bankrupt. The field appropriately back-lashed against that kind of empty-headed approach, and contempt for the Bible is one effect of this trend.
    So, if you ignore the Bible as a historical document, and you’ve not yet found corroborating evidence of David’s kingdom, you presume he never really existed (like Robin Hood).
    Of course, we’ve actually starting finding some of the kind of evidence you’d want to see to support the notion that David really lived and ruled a unified kingdom. Research marches on.
    But still, let’s not blame the British Museum for this one. We can still blame them for emphasizing illusory Palestine over genuine Israel.
    But also, a point of real credit. They have the Lachish tablets which depict the Assyrian conquest of Lachish in Israel (which had been prominently displayed in the Assyrian King’s palace in Nineveh as a celebration of his conquest). And at the time, I saw a genuine Vespasian Judea Capta silver coin of the Roman conquest. So, there’s two bits of ancient Jewish history solidly mentioned at the British Museum.
    The British only dislike the fact that the Jewish State came back.

  5. If I may… Several points that might make you feel better. I’ve just read a fantastic book by KA Kitchen that sheds some light on the matter at hand: On the Reliability of the Old Testament.
    1) The first mentions of an Israel Nation BY OTHER NATIONS that we have found is from 745 BCE because until then the Assyrians only mentioned their triumphal defeats against other nations. I believe, however, that we’ve found evidence more recently that upholds a davidic kingdom.
    2) The Jewish Alphabet we have today was not the original Alphabet used by the Jews. To my knowledge it was originally the cuneiform Alphabet used by the Canaanites that they describe.
    3) You misread the modifier “modern” as only applying to ‘Palestine’. It’s meant on the whole Palestine, Israel, Jordan, western Syria–what is today found on the map.

    But I’m curious why this all passed by Dr. Medad above…

  6. I need to clarify–I wrote ‘Israel Nation’, I meant the ‘Kingdom of Judah’, the exhibit is referring to the split of the Israel Kingdom into Judah and Israel. In essence they are sticking strongly to the facts, it’s our desire to see ourselves front and center that is tainting this exhibit.

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